Vienna hosted the stock exchange at the center of the 1873 Panic.
The crisis began with the Vienna Stock Exchange crash on May 9, 1873, a day remembered in German as Gründerkrach, or founders' crash. Speculative investment had surged in railways, real estate, and companies during an expansion after the Franco-Prussian War.
When confidence broke, share prices collapsed and financial institutions failed. The shock spread through Europe and reached the United States, where the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a panic and a long depression. The downturn is often called the Long Depression, although historians debate its precise boundaries and severity.
The 1873 Panic is sometimes confused with a purely American event. Its international character is important: credit markets, banks, and railway speculation linked Vienna, Berlin, London, and New York in a crisis that crossed national borders.